Mists of Pandaria Beta Key Giveaway
If you aren't in the Mists of Pandaria Beta yet, now is your chance! If you are a Curse Premium member, there is a very limited amount available on a first come, first serve basis over on Curse. It looks like all of the keys on Curse have been claimed, but don't worry, you can still win one in our giveaway!

The giveaway is for 100 x Mists of Pandaria Beta Keys.

To enter the giveaway, just reply to this post!

Entering more than once is useless and will get you disqualified. There will be no 2nd chance for people posting more than one comment in this thread, you have been warned. (We will also of course check for double accounts, etc)

The giveaway will be closed on Sunday, June 24th at 11:59 PM EDT (5:59 AM CEST) and winners will be chosen randomly.

If you want to talk about the rest of the news post, head over to this topic on the forums!

New Tillers Quests
The recent beta builds have added a few more quests that will give you an idea of what you will be doing on your farm. These also finally explain a little bit more about what Jogu wants to sell you!

Plant a White Turnip in Sunsong Ranch. You can purchase seeds from Merchant Greenfield in the Halfhill Market.

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The Tillers

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Beta Class Balance Analysis

Originally Posted by Blizzard
(Blue Tracker / Official Forums)

I ask this since 1 point of spirit will be essentially worth the same regardless of Tier of Gear. A crossover point of the importance of spirit/regen will exist. (I thought was the goal of having fixed mana pools was to avoid this.. as is, we potentially run the risk of being able to "overgear content with spirit")
It’s intentional that your regen increases over time. The idea is that your Spirit / regen increases with gear, but the amount you need to heal also increases as you do higher tier content, so that as your regen improves you are casting fewer efficient Heals and more inefficient Flash Heals and other expensive spells. The problem on live is that Intellect was also a regen stat (and a really good one that also improved your spell power) so mana regeneration grew at a faster rate than healing demands grew.

Just curious, and perhaps not relevant, but to what extent do abilities and their scaling get planned out for the increased ilvl that comes with each successive tier of content? Does that sort of thing get looked at during the beta, or is it more of a "we'll deal with that later because things are going to change anyways"? It seems like every expansion healing is really tight at launch, and turns into roflaoefest in the last tier, because that's the only way to "challenge" the healers. Similarly, (shield) tanks are short on their avoidance early on, but then end up capping their CTC.
We balance around the last planned tier for an expansion, and even a tier beyond that, just in case we add another tier or even something like Ruby Sanctum. What we can’t predict easily are what the encounters are going to be like at that time or what set bonuses will be, because we don’t plan those out multiple tiers in advance. In the case of shield tanks capping block, we knew we were going to have a problem and we intended to nerf it before the final tier, but then decided that the nerf would be so severe and so devastating to tanks, that the problem wasn’t worth solving at the time.

Man, GC. I know this is your job and everything, but how do you keep all of this info in your head? I don't think I could handle this for just a couple classes, much less the entire spectrum. Ins and outs of everything from the individual workings of spells to how an entire spec should flow. Just -SO- much information.
I do spend a lot more time dealing with this stuff than many players can afford to do, but the real answer is that it's a team effort. I have a bunch of really smart designers and they are all contributing to this process, and we're further supported by our community teams (in all regions) funneling questions and information to us. I’m the one posting, but it’s very much a group effort.

Isn't this especially problematic to balance specs though?
Sorry, my answer was unclear. The question was specifically: do you look at the last raid tier? Yes, we do. We also look at the first tier and all tiers in between. We also look at players in blue gear and quest greens and even what players first getting the MoP changes at level 85 will look and feel like.

Sometimes we still get it wrong, though we have gotten dramatically better over the years. Sometimes the numbers are balanced but we decide to change the mechanics of a spell or rotation, which then means the numbers are thrown off. Sometimes encounter specifics play a big role. The Firelands raid tier had a ton of movement fights followed by Dragon Soul, which had a ton of group up fights, and those allow different specs to shine and throw a harsh light on different sets of problems. Sometimes we balance around one rotation and then some time after ship, players figure out a different rotation or stat allocation or talent selection, which we didn't foresee and which throws our numbers out of whack. Sometimes there are bugs that we don't know about and balance around, which then throw off numbers when they are fixed down the road.

But we do look at everything. To use a concrete example, one of the things we do is whack ratings when an expansion begins so that there is room to grow into additional gear. As I have said before, this feels bad to players but is sort of inevitable because we can't start at say 75% crit chances and grow into 130% crit chances. However, we think the current loss of stats in MoP is too extreme, and is exacerbated by losing all of the passive talents and glyphs that often added haste and crit especially. We believe, and we're certainly hearing the feedback, that players are playing from level 85 to 90 with haste, crit and mastery percentages that are so low as to be unfun. We think we have room to bring those up a little, which is something we're looking at right now.

Death Knight (Forums)However, there's no way that all of this accounts for the giant discrepancy between Blood and Brewmaster damage, nor does it explain why DK's should even be thinking of using Heart Strike over Death Strike - but if we want to come close in damage we have to.
We have had a suspicion that Death Strike damage is too low. The target dummy / Patchwerk test is even harder for tanks, because the specifics of the encounter (are you kiting, doing DPS when you’re not the target, tanking two things?) matter so much. Parses for us to compare with our internal raid tests are great.

Druid (Forums)Alright, i've been testing Incarnation for some time and i have a few questions about it.
Your analysis of Incarnation looks about in line with our expectations; we expect that the fact that you can line Berserk and Tiger’s Fury up with it will be significant. Force of Nature’s damage for Ferals looks rather out of line; we’ll investigate that.

Monk (Forums)One of the things that I've noticed when testing Elusive Brew is that the stacks will sometimes fall off when using a slow 2hander. It turns out 3.6 base speed is a bit too slow to reliably crit every 30 seconds with ~20% crit, especially when facing boss parry/miss rates and crit supression.

Even my nearly hit/exp capped monk had his stacks fall off, as opposed to DWing's rather constant and steady gain of stacks. Is this on the radar?
The chances of this should be low (but indeed significant), and you can still use up the stack before it falls off anyway.

Paladin (Forums)Thanks for the reply. Is the intended design to have the 6 second timer ticking no matter what or start only when the target of Sacred Shield begins to take damage? Say I cast it on the tank, who doesn't take their first hit until 3 seconds after my cast. Will the second absorb be up after initial cast plus 6 seconds or initial cast plus 9 seconds?
Initial cast plus 6 seconds. When the target takes damage is now irrelevant, it just refreshes the shield every 6 sec. Think of it like a basic HoT like Renew or Rejuv; except instead of ticks healing, it applies/refreshes (but not stacks) an absorb shield.

Edit: That's Guardian's damage on a standstill target (just to clarify) It just doesnt have the noticable impact or power I guess I'd expect on a 5min CD ability.
Until recently, the Guardian for Ret was hitting in like the three digits. Almost all of the benefit from the cooldown was from the buff to the paladin and the explosion. We want the guardian to do some damage (he has that badass sword after all) and fixed this. I’m not sure if you have those changes yet.

Priest (Forums)It's no surprise. I am against Rapture as a regen mechanic. It's imbalanced against holy. Don't get me wrong, I LIKE having lots of regen... it just really isn't fair. Then add in the fact that Weakened Soul with multiple Disc Priests is always a fight in 25's with multiple discs. (now I understand that Rapture seems to be balanced round a 60 second Rapture CD... it still presents a potential stacking issue).
We’re just not seeing a big discrepancy in longevity between Holy and Disc whether they are trying to heal efficiently or inefficiently. Hopefully with raids opening today, we’ll get more feedback from players trying the content to see how mana feels.

Rogue (Forums)The ppm model for combat potency on combat rogues: It's pretty clear from tooltip wording (and from my initial tests) that slower offhands will have a greater chance to trigger combat potency. What I was wondering is if Main Gauche sourced combat potency procs are based on the main hand speed, the off hand speed, or a fixed proc chance entirely?
Combat Potency’s proc chance works as follows: Can be triggered by white offhand attack and main gauche hits (must land successfully). The proc chance is 20% for Main Gauche hits, and [20*OffhandWeaponSpeed/1.4]% for white offhand attacks.

Shaman (Forums)If you guys have the time, would you mind confirming for me how Overload works with Chain Lightning, and how this behaves with the glyph. I'm assuming that the overload chance (X) is divided by 3 and applied to each CL hit (ie: each hit gets X/3, which means the chance of a single CL overload is (1-X/3)^3). What I'm not sure of is whether the glyph applies X/3 to all 5 hits, so the chance at least on would be (1-X/3)^5, or it goes to (1-X/5)^5 instead.
Each target hit by your Chain Lightning has a 1/3 chance of being able to proc Chain Lightning Overload. The glyph does not change this. If you have a 30% Elemental Overload chance, and cast Chain Lightning on 3 mobs, there is a 10% chance on each of those targets (individual chances) for there to be a Chain Lightning Overload cast at that target (not the original target). If you then glyph Chain Lightning and cast it on 5 targets, there is still an individual 10% chance on each of those targets to have a Chain Lightning Overload cast at them. This also works the other way as well, however, as Chain Lightning on a single target effectively will give you 1/3 the number of Overload procs as Lightning Bolt will (per cast, of course).

Warlock (Forums)Oh no, they'll see my op multi dotting
Dot specs do well on council fights. Who knew? As I mentioned before, it’s important to look at target dummy / Patchwerk damage and actual encounters. We’re not going to balance every spec to the same damage on every encounter – that would be a little boring.

Warrior (Forums)So I think that removing the Rage income from these skills would be a bad way to push us into using Defensive Stance. For me, it would feel much more intuitive that leaving Defensive Stance even further reduced my defensive capacity rather than that it made me have to attune to an alternate form of Rage generation.
Keep in mind that going to Battle Stance gives you rage from white attacks. Prot spending a lot of time in Battle Stance was essentially double-dipping – rage from white attacks and yellow attacks. We're fine if your damage is higher in Battler or Berserker Stance, but you need to feel the most survivable in Defensive or everyone will be miserable.

Warlock (Forums)Haunt Uptime and drain TwistingHaunt is balanced around Nightfall procs. While it may currently be a small DPS upgrade (3%?) to swap Drain Soul and Malefic Grasp, the intent is that you use Drain Soul to generate shards when you need to hit a burst window or of course below 20%.
I feel like my statement was confusing. Let me try again:

Haunt is balanced around Nightfall procs. We don't assume you can keep Haunt up 100% of the time.

Currently (meaning at this moment on beta) it may be a small DPS increase to swap Malefic Grasp for Drain Soul. This small increase has led players to speculate that you're supposed to do that.

You aren't.

The primary intent is that you use Drain Soul in execute rage.

The secondary intent is that if you know a part of the fight is coming up when you absolutely need to kill something, that you can drop your DPS by using Drain Soul to build up shards to keep Haunt up 100% of the time during that window. This will hurt your sustained DPS, so if that is all you care about, don't do it. Your friends may yell at you though if you can't beat the encounter.

If the temptation to twist channels is still there, we will keep nerfing Drain Soul until that is not the case. At some point however, we will discourage locks from using Drain Soul for the burst window scenario mentioned above, because the total DPS loss wouldn't be worth the momentary DPS gain. That would be unfortunate.

Therefore we have to be careful not to make Drain Soul too good or too bad.

If that means that very skilled locks can occasionally sneak in a Drain Soul for an extra shard for a small DPS gain, we're okay with that. If it looks like lots of warlocks are trying to do that rotation though, we'll continue to nerf Drain Soul.

I think you meant to say " we will keep BUFFing MG until that is not the case" and " If it looks like lots of warlocks are trying to do that rotation though, we'll continue to BUFF MG"
I see what you did there, but we also don't want MG to be too large a portion of damage (including the haste benefit) because then you're even more dependent on shards. We still want lots of damage to come from the dots themselves. (We could buff MG and dots of course.)

We could just prevent DS from working above 20%, but then we'd lose the burst potential.

So we won't have accurate numbers until MG gets fixed.
There are some dot clipping issues with MG at the moment. (Blue Tracker / Official Forums)

Raid Testing Schedule - June 25

Originally Posted by Blizzard
(Blue Tracker / Official Forums)

For Monday, June 25 we'll be testing two encounters.

The encounter should be available at approximately the listed times below for all Beta Test Realms, regardless of suggested geographical region.

As always, this testing schedule is very fluid. We might have to change the time of a testing session due to various issues with bugs, builds, server hardware issues, designers being sick, class issues, etc. Keep an eye on this forum for the latest information.

Lost TV Spot Revealed

Originally Posted by Blizzard
(Blue Tracker / Official Forums)

You may remember Aubrey Plaza’s World of Warcraft TV spot that first aired last fall. However, what few people know is that a second version of the commercial was created and produced, but never aired on network television… for reasons that will soon become Obvious (big “O” intended).

And now, click over to IGN.com to see the version of Aubrey’s TV spot that was never released… until today. Enjoy

Student Art Contest Winners
Blizzard's University Relations and World of Warcraft teams put out the call to college and university students to submit an original 3D environment piece fit for World of Warcraft. The challenge was to create something the art team has never seen before, but still works within the World of Warcraft universe. The winners' artwork can be found below.